EQUAL FOOTING

Your cover story on Hollywood’s new black power players (by Richard Natale, June 14) has the details right but the big picture wrong.

The movie industry is increasingly driven by the foreign marketplace, with more than 50% of revenues coming from overseas. And conventional wisdom is that African American movies don’t make money outside the U.S. When you ask foreign distributors or sales agents what they want, the first thing they say is, “Nothing with blacks.” So economics becomes the rationale for today’s movie racism in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, a few African American movies will be made, but they’ll be ghettoized to low budgets because they have no foreign pre-sale.

If I were a black entrepreneur (and I’m not, I’m just a white guy), I’d start an African American film studio that would distribute its own product and break the color wall. The talent is there. But right now, access to distribution, and the cash that flows from it, are not.

ADAM LEIPZIG

Terra Bella Entertainment

Los Angeles

*

Tracey Edmonds, referring to a sitcom about college life for African Americans today, says that it’s “a genre that’s been missing on TV since ‘The Wonder Years.’ ”

Funny, I don’t recall any African American characters in “The Wonder Years,” nor did the series focus on college life. It was quite a “different world” than the one Edmonds obviously had in mind.

KARI PEARSON

Manhattan Beach